This isn’t a book review, it’s a literary rape scene. Robert Stacy McCain reviews Jessica Valenti’s SEX OBJECT:
New
York City is a terrible place to raise children. This is one obvious
lesson the discerning reader might glean from Sex Object, although it’s
not the lesson Valenti intends to teach, nor is it a lesson she has
learned, given that she and her husband, Andrew Golis, are now raising
their daughter in Brooklyn. The belief that New York is the only place
in America worth living has become an idée fixe among young writers,
even as the Internet has made it possible for anyone to be a writer
anywhere. No doubt the neighborhood in Brooklyn where Valenti and Golis
live is crowded with would-be writers in their 20s, English majors fresh
out of college, crowded into tiny apartments, working day jobs to pay
the rent in hope that their spare-time hobby — poetry, fiction,
political commentary, whatever — will someday make them famous. The
success of 1990s TV shows like Seinfeld, Friends, and Sex and the City
served as an advertisement for the idea that all the cool kids live in
New York, having zany adventures with their colorful cast of attractive
friends. The urban hipster lifestyle — tribes of carefree single buddies
hanging out together in their cool apartments — is now as blatantly
promoted by TV as was the suburban idyll of Ozzie and Harriet and Leave
It to Beaver in the 1950s. For all the media criticism that has emerged
from the latest feminist resurgence, no one seems to notice this
particular elephant in the room, i.e., the way TV sitcoms sell a
particular way of life. Because this urban hipster lifestyle is in fact
pursued by feminists themselves — all those ambitious 20-something girls
in Brooklyn — they don’t notice it for the same reason fish don’t
notice water.“Stay away from New York” is not a lesson
Jessica Valenti intends to teach in Sex Object, nor does she bother to
warn middle-class girls against the error of thinking that an elite
private university is the ticket to happiness.
Read the whole thing. It’s funnier than all the collected performances of Amy Schumer combined.